Ted Haggard Thinks your City is a Whore

Earlier post here.

Religion journalist Jeff Sharlet has a long piece, "Soldiers of Christ," in the May 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine about the Rev. Ted Haggard and his Colorado Springs megachurch, New Life.

My mother grew up in Colorado Springs, and I bounced in and out of there from childhood visits in the Sixties until a period in the Eighties when I lived in adjoining Manitou Springs and worked in downtown Colorado Springs.

So this part of the article caught my eye:

It is not so much the large populations, with their uneasy mix of sinner and saved, that make Christian conservatives leery of urban areas. Even downtown Colorado Springs, presumably as godly as any big town in America, struck the New Lifers I met as unclean. Whenever I asked where to eat, they would warn me away from downtown's neat little grid of cafés and ethnic joints. Stick to Academy [Boulevard of strip malls], they'd tell me, referring to the vein of superstores and prepackaged eateries--P.F. Chang's, California Pizza Kitchen, et al.--that bypasses the city. Downtown, they said, is "confusing."

Although it is not his main goal, Sharlet makes a good case for New Lifers as exurban parasites, taking the services that the city provides but being unwilling to pay for them, either financially or psychically.